Shouldn’t that be at the common core of
teaching from pre K all the way through grad school? I am not advocating living
in the forest all ones life.I am
advocating that we already know how to make that natural curiosity work in all
learning environments, including the classroom. Curiosity revolves around
questions.

Imagine instead of memorizing or
preparing for tests, regardless of what technology is available, and at any
age, we consider how to get all children to learn how to learn and love it by
doing the following. If they can do these, then I propose they will be college,
career, and life ready.

How do we build on their natural
curiosity, not destroy it? To what extent do we use both intrinsic and /or
extrinsic motivation?

ASK:

What is the big question they
want to know? These can range from why is the sky blue to… how can I build the
tallest tower using the 25 blocks on the rug to ... to what extent is the 2016 presidential race
different from or similar to presidential races throughout American history, or
how would you define quantum physics.

ASK:

What do they need to understand
to answer those questions?

ASK:

What knowledge must they acquire
to understand how to answer those questions?

ASK:

How and where will they acquire
the knowledge and understanding necessary to answer their big question or the
one posed by their teacher? What are the questions they need to ask to gain the
knowledge and understanding required?

ASK:

What skills must they have or
acquire to do all of the above?

I submit to you that these steps hold
true at all ages and abilities. They hold true for toy block builders, forest
pre K kids, explorers and pioneers, inventors, scientists, and even
presidential candidates…. Maybe especially for them.

The means to these ends are endless,
regardless of available technology. All involve some kind of wonder, sense of
discovery, trial and error, legwork, homework, or research dependent on age,
skills, and cognitive abilities. The means also depend on how each child learns
best and the particular question asked. The means can be visual, tactile,
linear (reading) or aural.It is our job
as teachers to help each of our charges find the right means for them and the
subject matter.

Finally, within our classes we know we
have children with a range of both cognitive abilities and skills. Some have a
high degree of both, some a low degree of both. Some have a high degree of
cognitive abilities, but a low degree of basic skills, and some have a low
degree of cognitive abilities, but a high degree of basic skills.For us the challenge is to be able to work
with all and each so that they keep that natural curiosity that drives real
learning and make sure that each child develops both the highest degree of
cognitive abilities and basic skills they are capable of.

If we follow this “common core” of techniques,
why does anyone need a Common Core forced on us by state
governors, Achieve Inc., and the federal DOE?

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

There
have been thousands of research studies done in the last 50 years on how we learn
foreign languages, published in reputable scientific journals and books.Using case histories, experiments and
correlational studies, researchers have examined topics such as which methods
are more efficient, the role of listening and reading as compared to speaking
and writing, the impact of correction and formal grammar study, and the role of
personality and motivation.

"Easy
ways to study foreign languages" (December 26) included none of this rich
storehouse of knowledge, presentingonly
the opinions of one (junior) reporter.

I
understand that the writer is a "college contributor." The fault is
with the USA Today editors for not providing guidance.Editors would never allow a reporter to give
advice on how to treat cancer without insisting that sources be consulted.Unfortunately, irresponsible reporting is typical
when the topic is education.

Easy ways to study foreign languages

By Maija InveissDecember
26, 2015 4:00 pmStruggling to
learn a foreign language? A lot of people are in the same boat. Whether
you’re just starting to learn a new one or are brushing up for a semester
abroad, use these tips to improve your language skills.Find an organization: Many schools have
clubs and organizations that focus on specific foreign languages. At these student
meetings you can find others also struggling to pick up a new language, as
well as those who have the expertise to help you improve your skills.
Importantly, it’s a great way to practice by talking with others — perhaps the
best way to pick up a new language. You can also learn about the culture
of the country you’re studying.Watch Netflix: Watch foreign-language
films on Netflix. At first, watch the movie with the subtitles — but then
turn them off. Watching American and British TV is often cited as a big
way people from other countries have learned English. Learning in this way
is fun, too. Don’t have Netflix? No problem! Find a radio station or news
station.Use Duolingo: The app Duolingo
is a fun way to refresh your language skills and a great way to study in
bite-size pieces. The app provides a well-rounded approach to foreign
languages.Find a pen pal: Services like My
Language Exchange can help connect students with other people in who
want to practice a foreign language. Reddit also has threads designed to
find pen pals. Often you might be able to find a native speaker. Native
speakers can teach you slang and more conversational phrases. My Language
Exchange gives users 115 different languages to choose from.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Students walk the halls at De Burgos Elementary School. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

by Daun KauffmanDaun Kauffman is North Philadelphia public school teacher. This article is posted on his blog LucidWitness.com

December 28, 2015

The Pennsylvania Senate's effort to amend the PA School Code (H.B. 530), is part of the backroom wrangling over our state budget.

Senate amendments
to the bill require the state to directly take over or close five
individual schools every year. This Senate incursion into education is a
textbook example of aggression and obstruction with no advance
intelligence, no input, from "frontline ground troops." So politicians
with uninformed philosophies push more and more state bureaucracy into
sectors where the state is ignorant and, in fact, failing.

It is impossible to continue silently enduring simplistic views of
learning and teaching practice (by non-practitioners) and simplistic
"solution pills" to "fix" or increase learning, which instead continue
generating more and more collateral damage: academic damage, systemic
damage, financial damage, social damage, personal damage, and more.

Newsflash: There is no simplistic, quick fix, or someone would have
done it long ago! In fact, Pennsylvania took over the School District of
Philadelphia 15 years ago already! The state's record of academic
decline, and their consistent record of precise underfunding of
Philadelphia in particular, is a prime cause of our condition, a
contrived disaster.

Ask yourself: After 15 years of state management, is the School District of Philadelphia better off today or worse off?

Now politicians want to go even further? The Senate proposes
a required micro-management (or closure) from the state level of the five
"worst" schools in Philadelphia.

All for the sake of negotiating a state budget?

I ask, "What secret solution does the state have?"

There are no capital programs, no curriculum programs, no
books, no supplies, no teacher incentives or punishments, no longer hours, no
charter business plans, and no "common core" or
"standardized" testing program nor even school closings that start at
the center of the learning process. Instead they all focus on the periphery.

The learners, children, are the center. Children are people.
It takes highly trained, highly competent people to work with people — with 30
people, in one room, all day, every day, while facilitating learning. Whether
we choose to view the truth, or adopt the pol's simplistic view of people
(children and teachers) as 'widgets' will determine success and failure.

Every so often the corporate foundations and the billionaires need to reach way down in their nasty bag of tired tricks to come up with another smelly old chestnut aimed to infuriate teachers and raise the worry levels of the general public. Their crass cures (more testing) for false problems are as predictable as their singular diagnosis (failed schools), which identifies the entirely predictable symptoms (low test scores) of a real problem (poverty) that remains entirely ignored by those with the resources to do something about it.The low standardized test scores are entirely predictable without ever taking even one of the many standardized tests that are used as evidence that public schools have failed to prepare children to become assets to the corporations that pretend to have jobs for them after high school--if they had been prepared for them. The sad truth, of course, is that there are fewer good jobs today for graduates than there were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago when test scores were no better than they are today. This gets us to the real crux of the matter, which is entirely hidden in the NYTimes story yesterday that appeared above the fold on the front page. This is no small mistake but, rather, a planned editorial decision that functions as a specific tactic for a larger strategy.

In the next few weeks, many subtle and not so subtle reminders will be broadcast far and wide as to why we should embrace the coming trade deal. which represents "the most brazen corporate power grab in American history." Sure to be swept through Congress in the coming days, the TPP, the implicit argument goes, is at least partially needed because American schools are not readying enough human capital for the corporations to exploit. If they were, American business would not need to send larger swaths of the remaining American jobs into the Eastern Pacific and the Far East, where workers will be exploited out of sight of American shoppers, who watch the video on their new phones of Asian workers jumping out of windows where their phones were made by what amounts to slave labor.

To do what is necessary to lay blame where there is none, a somewhat subtle rationale for sending even more jobs overseas is required. The phony rationale, of course, has everything to do with American graduates who are not "college and career ready." The way we know this, of course, is through "data," which comes from the same antiquated and racist tests that have been used for hundred years for social weeding and placing blame on a social institution (schools) that can never ever alter the conditions that are chiefly responsible for the vast gaps in scores between rich and poor.

At the same time, all the smug bastards from ExxonMobil or AT&T or Volvo are hedging their bets and ready to leap even deeper into the virgin Pacific Basin terrains for unregulated exploitation and economic wildcatting. In the meantime, American schools will be blamed if and when the leap occurs. Had we just done our job as educators, businessmen would not be burdened with establishing education policy and running our schools. When will we ever understand how that works?

Saturday, December 26, 2015

NYU announced last week that the university will begin selling an online teacher prep Masters program that is aimed at the poor and brown school children of America. Not to worry, though, NYU's Steinhardt School will continue to provide real professional teacher undergrad degrees to those students who have plans to teach in Westchester County or some other white enclave within America's leafiest suburbs.

No doubt NYU plans to make a lot of money on this internship-based online program, and no doubt some of the millions of non-profit dollars that the University rakes in will be used to pay for the millions recently laid out for renovations and palatial treatments to NYU's presidential living quarters overlooking Washington Square in lower Manhattan. The cash brought in from NYU's exploitative teacher prep for the poor will also be helpful in paying the $800,000 per year in retirement benefits when the current university president floats away on his golden parachute.

NYU Steinhardt will use Silicon Valley-based HotChalk’s technology platform, including an online video observation and collaboration tool provided by the New Orleans-based startup Torsh, Inc., to enable rigorous analytics designed to support, term after term, a continuous cycle of measuring, learning, and adapting to improve educational outcomes for students and teachers alike.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

The education industry's education news outlet, Chalkbeat, has a short feature infomercial on an African-American KIPP teacher in Indianapolis. His name is Andrew, and Andrew grew up attending a socioeconomically diverse magnet school in Louisville, KY. He speaks proudly about the benefits of such an education, and the irony presented by Andrew's current teaching job at an intensely segregated KIPP seems entirely lost on him or the reporter who wrote the story.

Andrew's story in Chalkbeat confirms the powerful learning and cultural benefits of
socioeconomic diversity that we have known about since James Coleman's research began in the
1960s. Sadly, Andrew is teaching in a segregated "No Excuses" school that offers children none of the diversity advantages that Andrew
enjoyed while growing up in Louisville.

Instead, Andrew's KIPP students remain
rigidly segregated in total compliance chain gang schools that middle class parents would
never allow for their own children. The beneficiaries of KIPP's kind of
miseducation are corporate foundations and the education industry, and
the result is the building of charter business empires on the backs of
the most vulnerable children, who must bear the burden of the paternalistic programs and Broken Windows philosophy that are
aimed to culturally sterilize the poor.

Hillary Clinton has caused a major scramble
by her supporters after she spoke at a small high school outside Des Moines,
Iowa. In her remarks she told the students at Keota High School on Tuesday,
December 22,

This school
district and these schools throughout Iowa are doing a better than average job.
Now I wouldn't keep any school open that wasn't doing a better than average
job. If a school is not doing a good job then, you know, that may not be good
for the kids, but when you have a district that is doing a good job it seems
kind of counterproductive to impose financial burdens on it.

Her political opponents have seized on this, claiming
that she is in favor of closing almost half the schools in the country.

She mis-spoke. Hillary
understands that the federal government doesn’t close schools. Period. A
mistake. A slip of the tongue. An unthinking bow to corporatist ideology. She
was wrong and she knows it. She has to walk back this careless statement. We
don’t need any more school closings. Such closings have had a
disproportionately harmful affect on communities of color. Talk about
school support, school helping, not closings. That’s yesterday.

In a December 17th article in
the Wall Street Journal, “Clinton
Views on Charter Schools, Teacher Evaluations Upset Some Democrats” (You must
do a Google search for the article title to get the full article.) it was
reported that some neo-liberal Democrats are worried that Hillary Clinton isn’t
fully committed to corporate education reform. Laura Meckler reported,

Their worries
stem from skeptical comments she has made about charter schools and teacher
evaluations, as well as her close relationship with teachers’ unions, who are
critical of both.

There are a
lot of deep-pocketed donors who are concerned, and they’re going to hang onto
their checkbooks until there is more clarity,” said Whitney Tilson, managing
partner of Kase Capital, who has given more than $150,000 to Democrats in
recent years. He hasn’t donated any money to Mrs. Clinton or the super PAC
supporting her this year “primarily because of this issue.”

Another major
Democratic donor, Eli Broad, refused requests for contributions from another
friendly super PAC, and only changed his mind after personal reassurances from
former President Bill Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta that Mrs.
Clinton will support charter schools.

“What year
did you come and sit in the living room with me?” Edythe Broad noted that
Clinton daughter Chelsea, now an active figure in the Clinton Foundation and
the Clinton Global Initiative, had been a baby at the time and that Hillary
Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of
State, had been Eli’s lawyer. After settling on 1983, Clinton said, “I looked
up one day and Eli was in my living room, and my life has never been the same.”
(Boldface added)

For the corporate unions and their paid stooges, the confetti from the ESSA celebration is probably getting a little soggy by now. For anyone who has looked inside the rewrite of ESEA has done nothing but rain on the Ravitch and FairTest parade ever since.

But I guess I "quibbling." After all, there is no punishment unless you don't test, which is still the racist tool that will be used to shut down public schools in favor of segregated chain gang charters.

My bolds:

Dear Chief State School Officer:

Before the spring 2016 test administration, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you of key
assessment requirements that exist under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as
amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (ESEA). These requirements will remain in place for
the 2015−2016 school year, and similar requirements are included in the recently signed reauthorization
of the ESEA, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

A high-quality, annual statewide assessment system that includes all students is essential to provide
local leaders, educators, and parents with the information they need to identify the resources and
supports that are necessary to help every student succeed in school and in a career. Such a system also
highlights the need for continued work toward equity and closing achievement gaps among subgroups of
historically underserved students by holding all students to the same high expectations.

Section 1111(b)(3)1 of the ESEA requires each State educational agency (SEA) that receives funds
under Title I, Part A of the ESEA to implement in each local educational agency (LEA) in the State a set
of high-quality academic assessments that includes, at a minimum, assessments in mathematics and
reading/language arts administered in each of grades 3 through 8 and not less than once during grades 10
through 12; and in science not less than once during grades 3 through 5, grades 6 through 9, and grades
10 through 12. Furthermore, ESEA sections 1111(b)(3)(C)(i) and (ix)(I) require State assessments to
“be the same academic assessments used to measure the achievement of all children” and “provide for
the participation in such assessments of all students” (emphasis added). These requirements do not
allow students to be excluded from statewide assessments. Rather, they set out the legal rule that all
students in the tested grades must be assessed.

. . . .

If a State with participation rates below 95% in the 2014−2015 school year fails to assess at least 95% of
its students on the statewide assessment in the 2015−2016 school year, ED will take one or more of the
following actions: (1) withhold Title I, Part A State administrative funds; (2) place the State’s Title I,
Part A grant on high-risk status and direct the State to use a portion of its Title I State administrative
funds to address low participation rates; or (3) withhold or redirect Title VI State assessment funds.

For all States, ED will consider the appropriate action to take for any State that does not assess at least
95 percent of its students in the 2015−2016 school year — overall and for each subgroup of students and
among its LEAs. To determine what action is most appropriate, ED will consider SEA and LEA
participation rate data for the 2015−2016 school year, as well as action the SEA has taken with respect
to any LEA noncompliance with the assessment requirements of the ESEA.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

This week it seems the ASD hostile school takeover scheme has hit another snag, when a group set up by ASD to rubber stamp its plans called the process a "scam." From the Commercial Appeal:

The group of people the state-run Achievement School District picked to add transparency to the school takeover process turned against the ASD on Monday, claiming the matching process was "a scam" meant to give the illusion of community input.

The group held a news conference in front of the Shelby County Schools administration building, although a statement from SCS said the district was not directly involved in the event. No one from the SCS administration was present, but board member Stephanie Love attended and spoke.

She, along with members of the neighborhood advisory councils that evaluated charter operators, called for families in the four schools slated for ASD takeover not to attend those schools next year.

"I am asking every parent whose school was taken over: Do not send your children to that school," Love said. "You begin to call the board and you tell us that you want us to put your children in a Shelby County school." . . . .

Friday, December 18, 2015

Diane Ravitch was a staunch supporter of the rewrite of ESEA until it was passed. Ever since last April, Ravitch and various neoliberal groups that she
fronts for have maintained a steady stream of enthused propaganda about
the ESEA rewrite.

The Every Student Succeeds Act shifts much–though not all–of the responsibity [sic] for testing and accountability to the states. States have more flexibility, if they choose to exercise it. Many states, lacking imagination or thoughtfulness, will continue to do what the Department of Education and NCLB forced them to do.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Modern education reform started in 1965, when the passage of the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act signaled that policy elites had chosen the politically expedient over the morally responsible. In doing so, the root causes of poverty and racism were buried beneath a mountain of misplaced blame labeled school accountability. The segment below this post from The Mismeasure of Education explains what I mean.

Beginning with ESEA, unequal student achievement became the proxy for deep inequalities that go all the way back to slavery, but instead of addressing the resulting poverty that is always mirrored in test scores, Lyndon Johnson and the Congress chose to travel the low and easy political road of pretending to fix schools, which quickly turned into a blame game that got everyone outside of schools off the hook for a deep and unacknowledged societal shame that was unequaled in the Western world.

Now fifty years later nothing has changed except that American businessmen have turned five decades of inept schooling interventions into an education industry that generates major revenue streams worth billions of dollars, which effectively cut channels that direct the flow of our society's children based on the whims of capitalists without conscience.

The recent passage of the reauthorization of ESEA shows that education reform has become much like the permanent "war on terror:" never-ending, misdirected, and arrogantly uninterested in the long term outcomes. The shame of the nation, as Kozol called our great moral failing, just got more shameful.

As noted earlier, education has not always been the chosen
road to opportunity and upward mobility.The case had to be made, and the solution had to be sold, and James
Conant was instrumental toward establishing education as the means to that
end.Between the New Deal and the early
1960s, policy makers at the national level consciously chose to focus efforts
to establish social and economic equity through increasing access to education
(Kantor & Lowe, 1994), rather than the more expensive and politically
unpopular route of wealth redistribution, job creation, guaranteed minimum
income levels, and programs to disrupt segregated living patterns and
inadequate health care provisions. Progressives in the U. S. had advocated
during the 1930s for the kind of social and economic development efforts that
became institutionalized in the social democracies of Western Europe and
Scandinavia after World War II, and the “movement to
expand government control of the market and to alter its distributional
patterns seemed likely to succeed even in the United States” (p. 6).Following World War II, however, the GI
Bill, the rhetorical messaging of leaders like Conant, and successes within the
labor movement had, in effect, reduced the perceived need for direct government
structural intervention in social equity efforts. The NAACP’s focus, too, on
school desegregation as the primary civil rights agenda added to the impetus
already taking hold:

By the
late 1950s and early 1960s, the political space for active state intervention
in the market had thus shrunken considerably. Although the Civil Rights
movement sought to put full employment planning and income redistribution back
on the public agenda, these policies generated little support from the middle
class or from blue collar workers who received benefits mainly through the
private sector. Consequently, when policy makers in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations began to formulate poverty policy, they ruled out active
government intervention to create jobs and redistribute income because without
widespread popular support they did not think they could win approval for such
measures in Congress (p. 7).

Even though the federal
strategy of increasing educational opportunities with large infusions of cash
was able to buy Southern support, finally, for the desegregation of schools, it
set a precedent for future generations policy elites who continue to espouse
the belief that “education is the civil rights issue of our generation” (Lewin,
2012, para 5). This expression has taken on a deep sense irony in recent years,
since federal education funding sets a high priority on the unlimited spread of
charter schools, which have a clear segregative effect (Frankenberg,
Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010; Miron, Urschel, Mathis, & Tornquist, 2010)
on public schools, even in areas where schools were intensely segregated
already.

The
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) came one year after the passage
of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and President Lyndon Johnson promoted ESEA as
a hard-to-ignore financial incentive aimed to make palatable the
non-discrimination requirements of the Civil Rights Act for Southern
segregationists.Johnson hoped that the
ESEA funds offered to states and cities that agreed to desegregate would
finally break the back of Southern apartheid, which had remained largely
undisturbed despite the 1954 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v Topeka
Board of Education decision.The plan
was hugely successful, so much so that apartheid education largely disappeared
in 17 Southern states by the late 1960s (Orfield, from Mondale & Patton,
2001). Distrustful, however, of the Southern political establishment in general
and Lyndon Johnson in particular, Senator Robert Kennedy did not want to see
the draining away of millions of Title I dollars before they could ever reach
the malignantly and impoverished minority children for whom Title I was
intended (Lagemann, 2000).Kennedy, in
fact, argued for standardized procedures and uniform data gathering, and he called for a “good faith administration effort to hold educators
responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the
touchstone of success in judging ESEA” (Mathison, 2009, p. 6). At a Senate
hearing in 1965, Kennedy went so far as to propose “some testingsystem that
would be established [by] which the people at the local community would know
periodically as to what progress had been made” (Barone, 2007, p. 4). In advocating program evaluations for the original
ESEA Title I programs, Kennedy unwittingly served to inspire the program
accountability movement in education (p. 10).

Robert Kennedy’s efforts to find out if
poor children were actually learning to read were complicated by new federal
budgeting requirements for implementing cost-benefit analyses aimed to increase
efficiency in federal spending by identifying the most successful
programs.Satisfying either aim would
have been difficult for a single evaluation scheme, but satisfying both proved
entirely too much.Further complicating
efforts, as Ellen Lagemann (2000) has pointed out, were state fears and
resentment related to potential federal control or state embarrassment for poor
results. All of these concerns were on the table as a new national assessment
was being developed, field tested, and administered in 1969.It was called the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP), and today it is known as America’s Report
Card.More will be said about NAEP in
Part IV, particularly as it relates to the use of arbitrary and unrealistic
norming in order to then use the low test results for political purposes.

Another
seminal event that unwittingly contributed to the growth of the educational
accountability by testing is known today as the Coleman Report (Coleman, et al,
1966). The mandate for the Coleman report came from the Civil Rights Act of
1964, which required a research study be conducted within two years of passage
to identify where educational resources in public educational institutions were
lacking due to “race, color, religion, or national origin” (Lagemann, 2000, p.
193). Almost overnight, previous education program evaluation criteria based on
resource inputs shifted to program outputs as the mandate for tracking
education program effectiveness was written into federal legislation.

While everyone, including James Coleman,
expected to find large differences in achievement based on large differences in
resources between the 600,000 children that his study included in 4,000 black
and white schools, the findings confounded expectations.As Coleman scholar, Gerald Grant (2009)
points out, Coleman found discrepancies in spending between black and white
schools to be less than expected, due to infusions of cash by Southern states
in hopes of maintaining the “separate but equal” apartheid systems.But even where resource differences were
large, Coleman found these disparities in black schools influenced student
achievement differences much less than “who you went to school with:”

Simply
put, Coleman found that the achievement of both poor and rich children was
depressed by attending a school where most children came from low-income
families.More important to the goal of
achieving equal educational opportunity, he found that the achievement of poor
children was raised by attending a predominantly middle-class school, while the
achievement of affluent children in the school was not harmed.This was true even if per-pupil expenditures
were the same at both schools.No
research over the past forty years has overturned Coleman’s finding . . . (p.
159).

Coleman and
his team (1966) found, too, that non-Asian minority children are more affected
by social composition than are white children, and that “if a minority pupil
from a home without much educational strength is put with schoolmates with
strong educational backgrounds, his achievement is likely to increase” (p.
22).Though this finding is commonly
cited in analyses and interpretations of the Coleman study, the dynamics that
shape this social fact are most often attributed to the social capital that
accrues for various reasons when poor children go to school with middle class
children.Coleman, however, clearly
introduces a race element beyond socioeconomic status that is related to the
effects of oppression and demoralization that is rarely cited.Therefore, we include this rather lengthy
quote below, which if attended to by policy makers, would doubtless create an
added urgency to dust off long-neglected integration plans.Notice that Coleman remains loyal to and
supportive of the charge given him under Section 402 of Civil Rights Act of
1964 to provide data related to “the lack of equal educational opportunity for
individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin . . .”, even
though his investigations have led him to findings that even Coleman could not
have predicted:

This analysis has concentrated on
the educational opportunities offered by the schools in terms of the student
body composition, facilities, curriculums, and teachers.This emphasis, while entirely appropriate as
a response to the legislation for the survey, nevertheless neglects important
factors in the variability between individual pupils within the same school:
this variability is roughly four times as large as the variability between
schools. For example, a pupil attitude factor, which appears to
have a stronger relationship to achievement than do all the “school” factors
together, is the extent to which an individual feels that he has some control
over his own destiny [italics added].
. . . The responses of pupils, except for Orientals, have far less
conviction than whites that they can affect their own environments and
futures.When they do, however, their
achievement is higher than that of whites who lack that conviction.

Furthermore,
while this characteristic shows little relationship to most school factors, it
is related, for Negroes, to the proportion of whites in the schools.Those Negroes in schools with a higher
proportion of whites have a greater sense of control.This finding suggests that the direction such
an attitude takes may be associated with the pupul’s school expererience as
well as the experience in the larger community (p. 23).

Coleman found hope, then, strongly correlated with the
presence of a sense of autonomy, which is more easily demonstrated, measured,
and retained where racial and economic mixing prevails, rather than in racially
and economically segregated environments—whether that segregation is sustained
by antiquated beliefs, legal maneuvering, or by outdated school assessment
practices.And it was this “pupil
attitude factor” of hope that had a greater effect on achievement than all
other school effects examined in the Coleman study, which remains the largest
research undertaking of its kind in U. S. educational history.

The Coleman findings on
socioeconomic status and school achievement echoed the findings of another
large, longitudinal study a few years earlier, whose similar results on the
topic were similarly ignored (for similar reasons, we may assume).The federal research project in 1960, Project
Talent, involved detailed questionnaires in over 1,300 high schools and a
series of tests for 440,000 students that included achievement, attitudinal,
interest, and aptitude tests, surveys, and questionnaires. Instruments were
administered in 1960 when students were 9th graders and again in
1963 when they were seniors.By 1973, it
is clear that Washington’s elite had digested the implications of these
studies, as expressed here by fiscal and monetary expert, Alice Rivlin (1973):

The most general
result of these statistical studies [the Coleman Study and the Project Talent
study] has been the finding that variables reflecting the socioeconomic
characteristics of students and their families explain most of the variation in
test scores, and variables reflecting school characteristics or resource inputs
explain very little.

These results should
not be exaggerated—they do not prove that "schools don't matter"—but
they certainly provide a basis for considerable skepticism about using test
scores as measures of the output of the education industry as such. Test score
changes may primarily reflect changes in the school population and the way it
is mixed, rather than the productivity of school resources themselves (p. 424).

Lagemann (2000) recounts the drama
surrounding the release of the Coleman Report’s initial findings in 1966, and
the subsequent “firestorm” set off within the Johnson Administration, which
knew that Coleman’s findings could sabotage the Administration’s strategy of
using the federal purse to buy Southern support to end apartheid schooling in
the South, as set forth by ESEA the year before.Johnson knew that Republicans, already
resistant to more federal spending, would seize and exploit the counterintuitive
fact that spending levels were clearly not the prime factor in performance
discrepancies.Coleman’s findings, too,
offered a swipe at a core component of the American secular faith in education
and educational opportunity as “the chief instrument for redressing the
inequalities of American life” (Kantor, 1991, p. 50).

This lofty notion had, indeed, fed the
Jeffersonian belief, later transferred to Horace Mann, that education may
provide solutions to social problems that were thought to be the result of the
poor’s own shortcomings.Blaming the
poor for their poverty is as traditional as our Calvinist forefathers of
Puritan New England, who viewed the socioeconomically unfit as having earned
their lack of status through their own moral failings (Rippa, 1996).These shortcomings, in turn, might signal the
column of the celestial tally sheet to which all souls had been added who were
not part of the Elect, or God’s elite.From this early theological base, there eventually grew the Protestant
economic catechism of the Gilded Age, with ample doses thrown in of Social
Darwinism, which “held that responsibility for poverty lay not with the
business cycle or the existence of a capitalist reserve army of the unemployed,
but with the moral failure of the poor themselves to conduct proper family
economy” (Dawley, 1993, p. 27).

By the 1960s the poor’s personal flaws
and the lifestyles (Kantor, 1991) they spawned were bundled within a new and
encompassing concept known as the “culture of poverty,” which acknowledged
structural barriers as well as the traditional blaming of the victim[i]:

First, though it acknowledged the structural sources of deprivation, the
culture of poverty thesis tended to focus attention more on the personal
characteristics of the poor themselves than on the economic and social
conditions that shaped their lives (Aaron, 1978, p. 20). Consequently, and this
is the second point, because it implied that people were poor due to their own
attitudes, behaviors, and life-styles, it suggested that changing the poor
rather than redistributing income or creating jobs was the best way to
eliminate the problem of poverty (p. 55).

The third
characteristic that Kantor (1991) attributes to the “culture-of-poverty thesis”
was its belief that, since the economic and psychological conditions left the
poor without the “will and capacity to attack the sources of their own
deprivation” (p. 55), professional intervention was required, which assured a
powerful role for the liberal public policy makers during the 1960s.Such interventions, however, did not disrupt
the underlying assumptions of economic order, systems of privilege, or existing
power relations, as initiatives to help the poor focused more on education and
training programs.As noted earlier,
these kinds of compensatory solutions could be provided without disrupting the
social and economic structures that would have been challenged by job creation
programs or other alterations to economic and socio-cultural patterns.The preferred compensatory strategies adopted
by liberals could “compensate for
capitalism's inevitable flaws and omissions without interfering with its
internal workings” (Kantor quoting Brinkley, 1991, p. 56).

Coleman’s
findings, however, were not governed by any of these assumptions.His findings clearly suggest the need for
structural alterations to the racial and socioeconomic organization of schools,
while clearly pointing to the limited value of simply adding resources without
structural modifications.The initial
findings of the Coleman Report, therefore, were appropriately muted by
Johnson’s White House; the media, with no open controversy to sell copy and
with its accepted narrative wisdom to protect, largely ignored the complete
findings when they did appear late in 1966 (Coleman et al, 1966).Both liberal and conservative policy people,
then, read the Coleman Report looking for ideological ammunition, and they
found it.Conservatives centrally concerned
with cutting costs and conserving the status quo cherry-picked Coleman’s
findings (Alexander, 1997) to argue that “throwing money”[ii]
at educational problems couldn’t fix them, while liberals used Coleman’s
findings related to social capital and the importance of racial and economic
mixing to argue for mandatory busing policies to achieve racial balance.Coleman remained disappointed (Coleman, 1972)
at the reception of the study, and he remained throughout his life an advocate
for removing all barriers to socioeconomic integration, even as an interim
measure toward achieving equity and equality (Kahlenberg, 2001). Kahlenberg
(2001) cites Coleman from a rare interview in 1972, in which his claim for the
significance of social capital is made unequivocal:

Coleman said
that research continued to show that "a child's performance, especially a
working-class child's performance, is greatly benefited by his going to a
school with children who come from educationally stronger backgrounds."
Coleman declared flatly: "A child's learning is a function more of the
characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher" (p. 62).

How
different today’s education reform agenda might be if Coleman’s core finding
had been acknowledged and taken to heart for its central truth: schools alone
can never consistently close the gaps in achievement that reflect deep
differences in levels of autonomy and privilege, wide disparities in
opportunity, deep veins of racism, and an ongoing and deepening hope gap.How different our schools might be if we were
to take seriously what good research already tells us, or if we as a society
were to fund other social science research with the potential to matter in the
health of our neighborhoods and our world.Or how differently our schools and our perception of schools might be if
we were to conceive of educational improvement as one important component of a
comprehensive commitment to social and economic renewal, in a way that
acknowledges the wisdom expressed by Jean Anyon’s (1997) quip:“Attempting to fix inner city schools without
fixing the city in which they are embedded is like trying to clean the air on
one side of a screen door” (p. 168).

Instead, it
would seem that another, though harsher, version of corporate education reform
is now aimed toward U. S. schools.The
latest testing/accountability scheme of Race to the Top continues to ignore
Coleman’s core research findings on how social and economic segregation impact
achievement, even as today’s corporate reformers continue to cite education[iii]
as the civil rights issue of the present era.If we are to believe, then, the mountain of scholarship[iv]
that validates Coleman’s findings (Garoran & Long, 2006) as they relate to
the power of shared social capital and the limited capacity of schools alone to
end output gaps as measured by test scores, we must surely find ways to counter
the essential irrationality that says there are “no excuses” for children and
teachers segregated by race and class, who must accomplish the impossible or,
else, accept the punishing and inescapable consequences.Here we are reminded Richard Hofstadter’s (1955)
warning to those who dare challenge the status quo masked as reform:

In determining whether . . . [social] ideas are accepted,
truth and logic are less important criteria than suitability to the
intellectual needs and preconceptions of social interests.This is one of the great difficulties that
must be faced by rational strategists of social change” (p. 204).

Until such
time that our society signals a return to common sense and humane values
applied to education policymaking, we may wonder what calamities may be
required to halt this generation’s “revolving, reformist administrative shell
game” (Martin, Overholt, & Urban, 1976, p. 71) to preserve the status quo
while proclaiming change.During the
first half of the previous century’s “orgy of tabulation” (Rugg, 1975), it took
an economic depression and a world war to interrupt the virulent
social-efficiency engineering project that eventually threatened democracy and
human rights everywhere.Will we, once
again, choose the failed efforts and dangerous intoxicants of the past in a
different guise, while ignoring the continuing retrenchment of structural
inequality and social inequity that make our democratic ideals increasingly
arcane and the hope that sustains us, adults and children alike, less likely
with each passing school year?

[i]William
Ryan coined the phrase, “blaming the victim,” in his 1971 book of the same
title, Blaming the Victim.

[ii]Karl
Alexander (1997) traces the skeptical research related to school spending to
economist Eric Hanushek, longtime Fellow at the conservative think tank, the
Hoover Institution:

Hanushek's first literature
review, titled "Throwing Money at Schools," covers 130 school-level
and person-level analyses of basic "bread and butter" issues,
including effects on student performance of pupil expenditures, class size, and
teacher experience. His conclusion (1981:30): "Higher school expenditures
per pupil bear no visible relationship to higher student performance."
That was in 1981. Then in 1989, with more studies in hand (N = 187):
"There is no strong or systematic relationship between schooling
expenditures and student performance." (Hanushek 1989:47).

Words like "strong" and "systematic" somewhat
qualify the 1981 conclusion, but the impression stands, and people in high
places take this work seriously. In a series of speeches in 1988, Former
Secretary of Education William Bennett invoked Hanushek's work to conclude:
"Money doesn't cure school problems. We've done 147 studies at the
Department of Education and we cannot show a strong, positive correlation
between spending more and getting better results" (cited in Baker
1991).

Such a sweeping conclusion is very likely wrong, however. For
example, a recent meta-analysis (Hedges, Laine & Greenwald 1994:11) of
Hanushek's 1989 data finds "substantially positive effects" for per
pupil expenditures and for teacher experience and "typically positive"
effects for teacher salary, administrative inputs, and facilities.